Gurning into the void

Lee Evans is sweating buckets and swearing profusely. He's just stepped on to the stage of the National Indoor Arena and about 13,000 people are gazing at him from all sides, waiting for the famously rubber-limbed funnyman to rise to the epic occasion and make them roar.

You can't exactly smell his fear, but you can tell what he's thinking. Something along the lines of "Ooh, cripes."

It's the first date of his new tour, a tour to end all comedy tours, braggingly titled XL and scheduled to visit an unheard-of number of Britain's biggest arenas. He's got nights and nights like this ahead of him; and, while his bank manager may be laughing, the pressure's clearly enough to make the man himself collapse in a weeping heap.

For the first quarter of an hour, it looks as though Evans may end up having to be carted off gibbering insanely as gag after gag lands in the great ocean of punters before him only to be swallowed up with barely a discernible murmur of approval.

Immediately flaunting his aptitude for hyperactive physical carry-on, he's here, there and everywhere, impersonating a gormless geezer handing out fathomless directions for Birmingham's one-way system and miming a demented wander round a labyrinthine B&B.

It's a gurn-a-second but hardly a laugh-a-minute. The effect is like watching someone trying to heat a room by rubbing their hands together. Much as one enjoys seeing Evans panicked and under pressure, this is ridiculous, for all the wrong reasons.

It takes a wince-making while, but gradually, Evans's inoffensive material and industrial-strength charm generate a cosier atmosphere. With three giant video monitors behind him, the show remains, right to the end of three long hours, rather like watching television, but at least it's television that has you chortling out loud rather than wandering off to boil the kettle. He can't hope to raise the roof, but at least there are discernible waves of laughter.

In rapid, scattershot fashion, he rails against pustular shop-assistants, the annoyances of chip-and-pin, and a thousand and one irritations of modern life and long-term coupledom. His solution to the obesity epidemic? "Put the fridge in the loft." His scathing view of those idiots who wear Bluetooth earpieces? "It looks as though you've had a fight with a walrus and lost."

He's got what it takes to make it through this tour in one piece, I suspect, but next time, when choosing his venues, he'd be well advised to downsize.